Delete all of /var/log?

Solution 1:

Instead of deleting the files you should rotate them, e. g. using logrotate.

You never know when you'll actually need the logs from some time ago, so it's better to archive them (up to a reasonable age, e. g. 3 months).

logrotate can compress your old log files so they don't occupy a lot of disk space.

Solution 2:

Delete all files:

find /var/log -type f -delete

Delete all .gz and rotated file

find /var/log -type f -regex ".*\.gz$"
find /var/log -type f -regex ".*\.[0-9]$"

Try run command without "-delete", to test it.

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Solution 3:

If you delete everything in /var/log, you will most likely end up with tons of error messages in very little time, since there are folders in there which are expected to exist (e.g. exim4, apache2, apt, cups, mysql, samba and more). Plus: there are some services or applications that will not create their log files, if they don't exist. They expect at least an empty file to be present. So the direct answer to your question actually is "Do not do this!!!".

As joschi has pointed out, there is no reason to do this. I have debian servers running that haven't had a single log file deleted in years.

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Solution 4:

I'm cloning virtual machines from a master. It makes perfect sense to clear the log on the master so that when you boot the clones you won't get the master's log. I did in tcsh:

cd /var/log
foreach ii ( `find . -type f` )
foreach? cp /dev/null $ii
foreach? end

which clears the logs but keeps the files.

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Solution 5:

Cleaning all logs on a Linux system without deleting the files:

for CLEAN in $(find /var/log/ -type f)
do
    cp /dev/null  $CLEAN
done

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Samba (/var/www/samba) creates log file-names with ip addresses, you may want to delete them:

for CLEAN in $(find /var/log/samba -type f)
do
    rm -rf $CLEAN
done